News & Achievements
Welcome to our lab's news page! Here you'll find the latest updates on our research milestones, student achievements, publications, awards, and other exciting developments from the TKAI Lab.
2025
October 2025
📚 Research Publications
- One paper accepted in Neural Networks - predictive coding survey with Karl Friston and Rajesh Rao
September 2025
🏆 Conference Acceptances
- One paper accepted in NeurIPS 2025 workshop - Circuit Complexity From Physical Constraints: Scaling Limitations of Attention - Congratulations Benjamin!
- One paper accepted in EMNLP 2025 (main) - "Investigating Pedagogical Teacher and Student LLM Agents: Genetic Adaptation Meets Retrieval Augmented Generation Across Learning Style" - Congratulations to students and collaborators.
🎤 Conference Presentations Rushitha Santhoshi Mamidala presented "Rethinking Reasoning in LLMs: Neuro-Symbolic Local RetoMaton Beyond ICL and CoT" at the 19th International Conference on Neuro-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning (NeSy 2025) — delivered both oral and poster presentations.
July 2025
🎤 Invited Presentations
- TKAI lab was invited to present work "Bridging Neural and Symbolic Computation: A Learnability Study of RNNs on Counter and Dyck Languages" by Thomas Lukasiewicz group university of Vienna
📝 Conference Papers
- Two more papers accepted into NeSy 2025:
- "Neuro‑Symbolic Data Collection Automata for Training Language Models on Edge Devices" with colleagues from Drexel University
- "Bridging Neural and Symbolic Computation: A Learnability Study of RNNs on Counter and Dyck Languages" in collaboration with Penn State
🎓 Student Achievement
- Rushitha Santhoshi Mamidala's Master's thesis titled "Rethinking Reasoning in LLMs: Neuro-Symbolic Local RetoMaton Beyond ICL and CoT" has been accepted to the NeSy 2025 conference for both an oral and a poster presentation.
June 2025
🎤 Conference Presentations
- Dr. Mali and Colleague presented "Empirical and Computational Advances in Enzyme Kinetics Prediction: A Machine Learning Approach to Catalytic Variability" in international metabolic engineering society
🏆 Prestigious Award
- Dr. Mali and his colleagues won prestigious "2025 ARMA rock mechanics research award" for their paper "Crustal Permeability Generated Through Microearthquakes is Constrained by Seismic Moment, Nature Communications, 15:2057"
🎓 PhD Defense Success
- Congratulations Dr. Neisarg Dave for successfully defending his PhD Thesis - Dr. Dave was co-advised by Dr. Mali and will join ADP as Research Scientist.
May 2025
🎤 Panel Participation
- Dr. Mali was invited as panelist at USF AMP conference (https://www.theampconference.com/agenda/session/1624886)
📝 Conference Acceptance
- One paper accepted in IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing
🏆 Student Award
- Undergraduate researcher Shrabon Das won USF CSE UG Award
April 2025
🏆 Student Research Excellence
- Abdul-Malik Zekri presented a poster at the 2025 OneUSF Undergraduate Research Conference, won the 2025 Undergraduate Research - General Disciplinary Student Award, and was recognized at the USF Student Research Awards Luncheon.
- Abdul-Malik Zekri presented a poster at the 2025 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) titled "Evolutionary Optimization of Biologically-Inspired Mechanistic Input-Output Neural Circuit Models in the Auditory Pathway." The project used custom genetic algorithms to evolve spiking neural circuits based on empirical input-output data.
March 2025
🏆 National Scholarship
- Abdul-Malik Zekri was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, a nationally prestigious scholarship recognizing outstanding undergraduate researchers in STEM fields, for work spanning biologically-inspired neural circuit modeling with Dr. Ankur Mali to semi-automated mitochondria segmentation workflows in collaboration with Dr. George Spirou's Auditory Development and Connectomics Lab.
February 2025
🔬 Research Program
- Abdul-Malik Zekri was accepted to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Undergraduate Research Program (URP) for Summer 2025. He will work under Dr. Anthony Zador on a project developing a general model of neuromodulation in neural networks.
January 2025
🎉 Student Internships
- Yusra Rasool secured an internship position at Nucor as data intern in the Business development Team.
- Zhanna Sergeeva secured an internship position at Dell as a software Engineer.
Last updated: October 2025